The talk that made your brain work too hard

Most presentations don’t fail because the speaker doesn’t know enough.

They fail because the speaker is trying to impress you with the sheer breadth of what they know.

​

I used to do this too.

Before I started writing a talk, I’d open five tabs on my laptop and try to work out how I could cram all of that information onto the fewest possible slides.

​

It’s easy to tell when someone has done it. They put up a slide full of dense text in a barely readable font. They use pixellated stock images. It's A page of UpToDate vomited onto the screen. And then, before anyone in the audience has had time to read it, they apologise.
​

“Sorry for the busy slide.”

​
And what do they do as soon as they apologise? They carry on regardless.

The slide stays up. You follow the red dot of the laser pointer like a demented cat.

​
They start talking through it, waving vaguely at the screen. “You don’t need to read all of this,” they say, then proceed to read it out anyway. A p-value here. A confidence interval there. A forest plot that flashes past before you’ve worked out which way the effect runs.

​
You’re trying to listen while also scanning, deciding what’s signal and what’s noise. Is that the primary outcome or a secondary one? Does that acronym mean what you think it means, or something very different?

​
Meanwhile, the speaker has already moved on.

So, you sit there, hoping it will all become clearer on the next slide.

​
At some point, something changes.

Just a small internal adjustment. You stop expecting it to get better.

You decide how much effort this is worth. You half-listen and half-read. You take a photo of the slide, because you see everyone else doing it and perhaps, they know something you don’t. You tell yourself you’ll make sense of it when you have more time.

And still, no one interrupts. No one puts their hand up to say they’re lost. That would feel rude. Or unnecessary. Or like admitting something you’re not actually paying attention anymore.

And the confusion stays private.

The talk keeps moving forward, but something else has slowed down. Your expectations. You’re no longer waiting for insight. You’re glancing at your phone, waiting for the end.

They apologise again without thinking. Not really pausing to consider what they’re sorry for.

What they’re really saying is this is going to take some effort from you.
​

It’s a warning.

​
You’ve heard it. You’ve said it. I have too.

​

​

The slides keep coming. Even more graphs. More tables. More detail than anyone can take in.

You’re trying to keep up. You’re reading ahead while the speaker talks behind you. You’re doing two jobs at once, listening for meaning while scanning for results, and doing neither particularly well.

You start making small decisions just to stay afloat. Do you listen to the explanation, or read the slide before it disappears? Do you focus on the headline number, or the footnote that changes what it means?

At some point, you realise you’ve stopped listening.

So you adjust.

You stop trying to understand everything and start trying to catch something. A phrase. A conclusion. But that animated text keeps on drawing your eye. You tell yourself the important part will be obvious when it arrives.

When it’s over, there’s a brief moment of relief. You clap. You gather your things. You move on to the next session or the next patient or the next meeting.

Ten minutes later, if someone asked you what the talk was about, you’d pause.

You could probably name the topic. You might even remember a few details. But the central idea, the thing you were meant to leave with, is strangely hard to pin down.

It’s not that nothing was said.

It’s that nothing had anywhere to land.

​

​

Sitting there, it doesn’t feel like the problem is complexity.

You don’t think this is too advanced for me. You think something that’s harder to put into words.

I’m not sure what I’m meant to be paying attention to.

The information keeps coming, but there’s no sense of where it’s going. No signal about what matters more than everything else.

​

​

This is where things tend to go wrong.

Not because the speaker hasn’t thought hard enough about the topic. They almost always have. But because they haven’t really stopped to think about the audience.

What did they actually want people to leave with?

Not everything they knew. Just the part that mattered most.

What did they want the audience to think differently?
To feel more confident about?
To do differently when the talk was over?

​

​

​

It’s hard to put your finger on why this feels so draining.

You’re not confused in a dramatic way. Your brain is working harder than it should be.

Your attention is going on basic orientation. Figuring out what the data is for. Working out which result outranks the others. Trying to guess which detail you’re meant to remember and which one will never be mentioned again.

You only have so much mental energy to spend. And a surprising amount of it is being used up just trying to work out what matters.

That’s why people don’t need more data. They need to know what the data is for.

The sage on the stage has been marinating in this topic for months. The structure feels natural to them. The emphasis feels obvious.

To you, it isn’t.

Everything arrives with the same weight. Everything sounds important. And if everything matters, nothing does.

This is the moment you realise what’s missing.

Not information.

Orientation.

You’re not being told where to stand.

​

​

Most talks that work have a centre of gravity. One core idea that everything else is there to support.

When that centre is clear, the rest of the detail settles around it.

When it isn’t, even good data feels heavy.

You can feel the difference immediately.

You can feel when someone is guiding you rather than trying to impress you.

The room is quieter because people are leaning in. They know what they’re listening for. Their attention isn’t being spent on triage, so there’s something left over to actually remember what’s being said.

Clarity feels like generosity.

This isn’t about oversimplifying. From where you’re sitting, it never feels that way. It feels like care.

It feels like someone has made a decision on your behalf about what deserves your limited attention.

That’s what expertise looks like from the audience’s side. Not more slides. Not more coverage. But exclusion.

Anyone can add slides. Not everyone can remove them.

​

​

​

And this is where an uncomfortable question starts to form.

If this experience is so familiar, if we’ve felt it, recognised it, allowed it, why do we keep doing it this way?

​

​

The uncomfortable part is this.

If you’ve sat through talks like this often enough to recognise the feeling, you’ve probably given one too.

Not because you don’t care about your audience. Not because you don’t understand how attention works. But because when it’s your turn at the front, something shifts.

You start thinking about what you might be asked. What you’d struggle to defend if it wasn’t on a slide. What you’d feel embarrassed not to have included.

You start thinking about coverage.

So you bring everything with you. The background. The edge cases. The data you don’t fully trust but don’t want to be accused of ignoring.

From the inside, it feels responsible.

From the seat, it feels familiar.

This is the quiet trap smart people fall into. The instinct to prove you’ve done the work overwhelms the harder work of deciding what the audience actually needs.

And because you’re close to the material, because you’ve been marinating in it, it’s genuinely hard to tell where clarity ends and overload begins.

Nothing here is malicious. Nothing here is careless.

It’s just very human.

I still find myself deleting slides the night before I’m due to give a talk.

​

​

The good news is that you already know what to do.

You know exactly what it feels like when a talk makes your brain work harder than it should be. You also know what it feels like when someone does the opposite. When they guide you, orient you, and show you what’s important.

The next time you’re asked to speak, notice where your attention goes first.

Notice how quickly you start thinking about what to include. The slides you might need. The details you don’t want to leave out. The urge to prove you belong at the front of the room.

Then pause.

Before you open PowerPoint, before you start building, ask yourself one question.

What do I actually want them to leave with?

Everything else can wait.

The kind of speaker who makes things easier for other people.

​

​

Speak Human is a free weekly newsletter. One practical idea at a time.

​
​
Speak soon,

Andy